Observe Your Behavior To Gauge Emotional Stability

Life isn’t always a walk in the park. Sometimes, there are very real reasons to withdraw and become less inclined to live life as progressively as you might be used to. Life events knock us around and elicit some painful, some worrying, some happy emotional responses. For the most part, your attitude determines how you respond to these events because you have power over your mind and can choose how you respond to the worst of trying times.

Sad Image via O Four

Historically and politically, many people have made it through horrific external circumstances and have come through the other side. However, the advice you read from motivational guru’s about ‘simply think your way out of an emotional response’ sometimes doesn’t hold stock. Sure, you can interpret what those emotions mean and work on them, so they are stronger and less prone to instability, but simply telling someone to ‘shift attitudes’ when experiencing the death of a relative, the loss of a golden opportunity or a public embarrassment is not always the easiest thing to accomplish. We are not beings of thought only.

However, sometimes life events can knock us around to the degree that significantly changes the way we live and the way we choose to progress. As humans, we are supremely skilled in lying to ourselves and justifying our course of actions, as if every step we take is the right step. You’ve probably noticed this in your social arguments. After one completes, and you have time to reflect, we are naturally predisposed to define to ourselves how much we were in the right despite how the situation turned out, and if only the other person listened we needn’t be in the place we find ourselves in now. This is disingenuous thinking, and can be quite harmful. Along these similar lines, if you find yourself living the following ways in response to a harmful life event, you might need to reassess your strategy and visit a trained psychiatrist to help you through the issues.

Upturned Sleep Schedule

A good identifier for depression or emotional difficulty is trouble sleeping. This might result in you finding it difficult to sleep at your usual ascribed bedtime hour. If trying to hold down a 9-5, this can be extremely damaging, and the negative results will slowly grow emotionally and take a hold in your life. Sleep deprivation is a real issue, and if you’re already experiencing some form of internal difficulty, this can only make things worse. People who are sleep deprived have a 60% higher chance of developing some form of mental illness, and so it’s important that you work on your sleep hygiene as a major priority. Many people feel that sleep will take of itself, but that’s not always so. Just as you need to eat a balanced and nutritious diet to function on all cylinders, sleep works the same way in that it’s a survival need that needs maintenance to be optimized.

Social Withdrawal

Social withdrawal surely means that you have something you’re trying to hide from. This might not simply be pulling out of invited events or heading out with your friends less and less. It can culminate in other ways too, such as finding it hard to meet eye contact with anyone, finding your sociability and amiability and work on the decline, or simply feeling like everyone around you is on the other side of a glass wall. Emotional isolationism is a real issue, and it’s a protective shell that at first might seem to protect, but in the final examination only suffocates.

If you are experiencing any of these issues, visiting a professional should be your first port of call. They are easy to creep up, so be sure to keep a wary eye out, especially after emotional turbulence.